This comic pokes fun of attempts to "fix" the calendar by making it simpler or more rational, which inevitably result in a system just as complicated. This is an example of the paradox in complexity theory that if you attempt to simplify a system of problems by creating a new system of evaluation for the problems you often have instead made the problem more complex than it was originally.

Because there are approximately 365.2422 days in a solar year, various calendars use different means to keep the calendar year in sync with the solar year and the seasons. The Julian Calendar, for example, has leap days every four years, giving it an average year length of 365.25 days. The most widely used system is the Gregorian Calendar, which also has leap days every four years, but skips leap days in years divisible by 100 unless the year is also divisible by 400. This gives it an average year length of 365.2425 days, which is very close to the length of a solar year.

Other calendars have been proposed, such not counting leap days and special "festival days" as a day of the week, in order to make every date fall on the same day of the week every year.

At "24 hours 4 minutes", EST days are longer, though there are only 360 of them in the year. The extra 4 minutes over the course of 360 days adds up to one standard day, so Randall's EST calendar would at this point have a year that is 361 standard days long.

Running the clock backwards for 4 hours after every full moon gives 8 additional hours at each full moon, twelve or thirteen times in a year. Because a thirteenth full moon will occur once every 2.7 solar years on average, this modification adds 4.1228 standard days to an EST year, bringing it to 365.1228 days.

The doubling of the non-prime numbers of the first non-reversed hour after each solstice and equinox is a final, very complicated way to bring Randall's EST year in extremely close sync with the solar year. There are 17 prime numbers between 0 and 59 and 43 non-primes. There are 2 equinoxes and 2 solstices each year, so a total of 172 minutes will occur twice. This brings the average length of Randall's EST year to 365.2422 standard days, equal to the solar year to four decimal places.

While it is fairly simple to describe, EST is far from simple to understand or put in practice. Clocks in particular would have to regularly undertake very complicated processes like running backwards or duplicating non-prime minutes.

EST does appear to be fairly clearly defined.

EST fails completely to be unambiguous. Following each full moon, four hours occur three times, twice forward and once backward. Several minutes are also duplicated, making times during those periods ambiguous.

The only way EST is free of historical baggage is that it breaks free of any sensible bits of historical baggage; it keeps such things as the 30-day month and 12-month year, but adopts a different (and variable) length of day that would make it wildly out of sync with the Earth's day-night cycle.

EST is compatible with old units, as far as seconds, minutes, and hours are concerned, though not for days, months, or years.

EST is indeed very precisely synced with the solar cycle.

EST is free of leap years, though some EST years are 8 hours longer than others on account of having an extra full moon.

A calendar amenable to date math makes it easy to find the length of time between two dates and times by having standardized periods of time. The complex variability of the length of EST years, days, and hours mean it is only intermittently amenable to date math, which is to say not at all.

Narnian time is a reference to the fictitious world of Narnia in CS Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and its sequels. In Narnia, time passes much more quickly than in the real world. You could be in Narnia for several days and only a few minutes would have passed in the real world. However, synchronizing this effect would be impossible because it is not a consistent rate; it fluctuates wildly based on the whims of drama and magic.

The Gregorian calendar does not include the year "0", after "1" BC the next year is "1" AD. Randall's invention fixes this according to correct Mathematics, only to reintroduce the problem immediately by arbitrarily omitting the year 1958. The year 1958 is significant because January 1, 1958 is the epoch (time zero) in International Atomic Time (TAI), which is part of the basis for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). (The main difference is that TAI doesn't add leap seconds.)

The title text may be a reference to the ancient (Pre-Babylonian Exile) Jewish Calendar, which did not name the months, rather assigning them numbers from 1 to 12. The names used by Jews today are the names of the Babylonian months, derived from various Babylonian deities.

Discussion

"24 hours 4 minutes" because the period of rotation of the Earth is 24 hours MINUS four minutes.

EST = Eastern Standard Time (USA) or England Standard Time (UK); there's no easy way to disambiguate this since it is a common time zone for English speakers in the USA and UK.

"Run clocks backward" a possible reference to the leap second.

"0.9144" because 1 yard = 0.9144 meters

"triple 4 hours after every full moon" = add on an additional 12 hours every full moon, to make the time between full moons exactly 30 "days" (in real life it's 29.5 days). 75.103.23.206 21:44, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Erm, just like to say, as a UK resident for all my life (five decades, adult and child), that I've never heard of "English Standard Time". GMT is Greenwich ('Gren-itch') Mean Time, which is for most purposes the same as UTC (which officially took over in the early 70s, but most lay-people still say 'GMT') and all the various other prime standards in use (give or take leap seconds, planetary rotation/orbitting adjustments, adherence to atomic clocks, etc) and BST (British Summer Time, i.e. GMT+1)has just taken over for this sun-tilted part of the year. A brief check of the usual reference sites reveals no sign of EST existing any time since any form of standardised "Railway Time" was originally instituted in the days of the Industrial Revolution, but I might have missed it.

Anyway, as such, the two ESTs is surely a constructed part of the joke not (as I read it) some fact from RL that needs explaining. Yes, there's EST (Eastern Standard Time) for the US (and versions for Australia and elsewhere?), as well as main Egyptian time-zone and European Summer Time (actually a over-term for the three varieties: Western, Central and Eastern). (The UK roughly matches up to Western European Time and Western European Summer Time accordingly, but that's by no means official except possibly by convention/shared heritage of definition.) But I think the joke with the two 'EST's is purely to do with something like the whole Yard/Metre(/Meter) thing. Although initially I imagined it might be something to do with UK/US Gallon differences, albeit that we now tend to have to use Litres. Or, if you prefer, 'Liters'. ;) 178.99.20.83 21:49, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

I seem to recall that Narnia time ran usually much faster but sometimes much slower than real-world time. 130.160.145.224 20:51, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

I always thought that Taiwan, Province of China missed a golden opportunity here to establish propaganda that they founded it. Instead they are known as a township in the US. 66.88.136.254 20:01, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Think of what Jack Bauer could have done with 4 more minutes! 108.162.254.101 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

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